Extended Claims Jump 8.5% As Initial Claims Continue Sideways Crawl

Initial claims beat expectations but remain in a narrow 'flat' range for the last year. Non-seasonally-adjusted claims dropped notably to their lowest in 5 months. Since January we have seen multiple estimated states and a lot of choppy noise in the initial claims data. Almost perfectly offsetting this choppiness in the main headline data is the swings in Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) benefits which rose 8.5% or 187k this week. One thing is for sure, the last two months have seen an unprecedented amount of noise in the claims data that we can only put down to seasonally-affected-disorder (or statistical idiocy with 5 sigma swings each week).

Initial claims continue to print in a narrow range with the downward trend of 2010 and 2011 having stalled...

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but along with the crazy swings in the claims data of the last few weeks, EUC data has shifted into new territory for noisiness...